Aura
“The body says what words cannot.”
Martha Graham, Interview in the New York Times, 3/31/1985
“An artist carries on throughout his life a mysterious, uninterrupted conversation with his public.”
Murice Chevalier, Holiday, Sept 1956
“Elegance is good taste plus a dash of daring.”
CArmel Snow, The World of Carmel Snow (1962)
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”
Gore Vidal
“Success depends on three things: who says it, what he says, how he says it, and of these things, what he says is the least important.”
John MOrley, Recollections
“Except when it comes to bravery, we are a nation of mice. We dress and behave with timid circumspection. Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.”
Edith Sitwell (1962)
“The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.”
Kenneth H. Blnchard, University of Massachusetts
Spiritual Presence
“As a baby I remember crawling around inquisitively with an incredible sense of joy, light, and freedom in the middle of my head that was bathed in energies moving freely down from above, up, around and down through my body and my heart. It was an expanding sphere of joy from my heart. And I was a radiant form, a source of energy, bliss and light. And I was the power of Reality, a direct enjoyment and communication. I was the Heart, who lightens the mind and all things. I was the same as everyone and everything, except it became clear that others were unaware of the thing itself.”
Da Free John (Adida), The Enlightenment of the Whole Body
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Sir Isaac Newton, Letters
“The world was full of people rushing around trying to change things or make themselves seen. So it fell to the rest of us to withdraw from the foreground, just like those distant bluish landscapes in old paintings, so discreet you only notice them later. I liked to imagine our kind as thinkers in training, a flow of indefinite blue that deepens over time.”
Chloe Aridjis, Asunder (2013), p.14
“All things are ready, if our minds be so.”
William Shakespeare, Henry V
Life as Performance
“For heaven to be thanked, we live in such an age, When no man dies for love, but on the stage.”
John Dryden, Epilogue to Mithridates
“When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.”
W. Somerset Maugham. The Circle
“They who are in the highest places, and have the most power, have the least liberty, because they are the most observed.”
John Tillotson, Reflections
Sense of Identity
“As soon as you can say what you think, and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on your way to being a remarkable man.”
Sir James M. Barrie
“There are only two ways to be quite unprejudiced and impartial. One is to be completely ignorant. The other is to be completely indifferent. Bias and prejudice are attitudes to be kept in hand, not attitudes to be avoided.”
Charles P. Curtis, A Commonplace Book (1957)
“Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely as a vehicle for joy.”
George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets
“Self-trust is the first secret of success.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Success
Be Fully Present
“One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears– by listening to them.”
Dean Rusk, Reader’s Digest, July 1961
“Women like silent men. They think they’re listening.”
Marcel Achard
We Are Part of Something Larger
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
Eliel Saarinen, Finnish architect
“The silence of the stars is the silence of creation and re-creation.”
Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night
“A want of tact is worse than a want of virtue.”
Benjamin Disraeli, The Young Duke